How to Use the FBAScan App

In this video I bring up the topic of how to use the FBAScan app by asellertool.com along with a dive into it’s features and a bonus at the end!

So in this video we’re going to talk about the app FBAScan. I’m going to give you guys a quick tutorial on it, maybe a little bit of a deeper dive, as well as a bonus at the end. Let’s get started.

Hey guys, this is Lenny from SimonSaysResell. I am going to share my experience of selling on Amazon, both FBA and merchant fulfillment. Whether you’re a new seller or an old seller, I think these videos will help you out in some way shape or form, so definitely check them out.

So yeah today we’re going to go ahead and talk about a particular app that I use is called FBAScan. Now there are other apps out there that you can use to scan different items like books and toys and things like that, but in particular FBAScan; I personally use because it has a few bells and whistles that the others don’t and I also seem to, you know think it has a little bit more of an accurate reading and results than the others and that’s just my personal opinion. The other apps you can definitely check out are profit bandit, the Amazon seller app of course and Scoutify, that’s included with the inventory labs account, I actually used inventory labs for my accounting reasons and I’ll get into that in another video, but today is primarily about the FBAScan app. I’m going to kind of give you a quick introduction to it. I’m also going to give you a little bit of a, I guess a deep dive to show you some of the tools and features you can use, and even at the very end I’m going to give you a little bonus on how I set up my triggers.

Now a trigger is basically, you set up rules in the app to… when those rules are matched, then it does something in the app, maybe it says okay buy this book or maybe reject this book. So definitely a cool few features in there.

Now one thing to know and I’ll say it now and I’ll probably say it later is, the triggers themselves that I show you later aren’t perfect. They’re not hundred percent, it may miss some books that you are maybe interested in, or may get books that you’re not interested in. So keep that in mind, but I use it myself, I have other Scouters that I give it to, so you know it definitely worked for me, but it’s not a 100 percent but it does speed things up a bit. Now I talked to other Scouters, big sellers, re-sellers and they don’t use the triggers and some do, so it’s kind of a mixture but I do mostly, but I mainly give them to my Scouters so they can go ahead and scan the books particularly very quickly. So that’s what I’m going to get into today and I hope you guys enjoy it. Let’s get started.

Just go ahead and download the app when you can. I just did on my iPhone; just search for FBAScan in the app store, if you have an iPhone or search for FBAScan in the Play Store if you’re on Android.

So go ahead and open it up. The app is actually made by a company called ASellerTool. You can go to ASellerTool.com to find more information about the app and the different subscriptions they have for the app and a little bit more on that later.

When you first login you’ll get a little notification here, is the FBAScan app is able to jump into and log into your Amazon seller account to notify you if there’s any restrictions on any items that you’re scanning. Since I mainly do books, I don’t really bother with this, but for those that are doing toys and other non-books types of items, I would go ahead and maybe login to this when you can. So if you hit OK, it will log me into my Aseller or my Amazon seller account and that’s it, then you don’t have to worry about anymore. It’ll just kind of keep it there, and if you do scan any restricted products it will come up and tell you so that’s kind of neat. So I’m going to close it for now because I don’t really need it to show you.

So when you first jump in, you’ll kind of see a little UI like this. I’m going to take you through some of the basic steps and then we’ll start scanning a few books and then I’ll give you a little bit more of a bonus item here to show you kind of the triggers that you can set up here.

So when you first login, depending on what subscription you have. There’s different types; there’s the lite description which really gives you unlimited live mode scans. So if you notice on the top left it says LV that means live mode or live. What that uses is, it uses my Wi-Fi and/or data connection to go ahead and pull down information from the internet based on the book that I just scanned. So it basically uses your data connection.

There are other cool features on this app and that’s one thing that makes it very neat, in particular is the database mode. So if you’re in a poor signal area, may be you are in a library or a basement somewhere. a library sale and your signal is just terrible, you can switch to database mode and what that does, it downloads a database to your phone, so when you scan a book or scan an item it’ll come up very quickly in the results probably as fast as you can blink it. It’s very very quick.

The only caveat to that is you have to remember to update the catalog to your phone before you go out over Wi-Fi for example, because the file can probably take 15 to 20 minutes and I think it’s maybe around one gig or so but I’m not a 100 percent sure how big it is. Maybe more than that, but you definitely don’t want to do this over your data connection, like on your cell phone service. You want to do it at home on Wi-Fi or any Wi-Fi that has decent connection to download the database first, because you want to make sure you update it before you go to the book sale or whatever sale you’re going to. So some people forget to do that which obviously can cause an issue but, just keep that in mind.

And the other thing is, the lite plan under the ASellerTool app subscription doesn’t include the database. So you have to pay a little bit more for that and we’ll get into that later, but so what you can do here is if I click on the top left those three bars in the top-left, it will give me more of like a kind of menu type page. You’ll see there’s download, test data or data test blah blah blah. So we’re going to download. This is where I would go, if I wanted to download the catalog. Now I have the account to do this but I’m not going to show it to you because it’ll take a little bit of time, but if I did have the subscription to download the database, I’ll go ahead and just click start, and it’ll check my credentials and login and within about 10-15-20 minutes it will be up-to-date. So then I can switch this to database mode, just start scanning like crazy and it won’t use my data signal at all. It’ll come back very quickly with results.

Now one thing to note too is that the database mode, it doesn’t show you all the data, like it won’t show the pictures, it won’t show all the data, sometimes that the weight is a little off, sometimes the sales rank isn’t as up-to-date as you would hope it would be, because that’s one thing I first did when I first started as I tested the database mode and compared it to live mode, and there was a bit of a difference but when you think about it, if you update the catalog before you go out and then you go out and do your thing. The sales rank and other stuff won’t be that far off. It won’t be exact obviously but it won’t be that far off. So you kind of get by. So it’s not terrible.

I will show you database mode lately though, because I think I have an older data… you’ll see my database was last updated December 31st. So it’s quite some time but, because I don’t want to use it as much as I probably do because I actually have my Scouters go out and do this for me. So I don’t really go out that much that I need the database more. I usually do live mode myself because where I am, the signal is pretty good.

So if I back up; let’s go to data test, it will just show you some test data. This is kind of what it looks like in database mode. As you can see there’s no picture, it kind of cuts off the title. It gives u sales rank, profit, couple other things, the pound, it kind of averages around two pounds; I actually did notify the developers for this to let him know that, I think on average it just does everything to 2 pounds which is good and bad. So let’s go back to the menu.

Operating mode. This is pretty neat. So the very first one is database mode, as you can see. So if I click on that and then I scan a book, and to scan a book on the top right there’s a little bar code line through it, that’s to scan a book. So let me pull up my book here. You can see I got my book, scans it, boom already done. So my databases old, that’s kind of cool to show you guys, so when your database is old, it actually tells you, but here you go. So let’s scan that within database mode. It came up pretty quick. Mine has the little error message that came up, but there you go; that’s two pounds again for a weight which is the top or the middle right a little scale on it. Little buy boxes is in the middle, there’s no buy box information, there’s no list retail price on the left there.

Again this is mainly for really quick searches. Now if you’re in a library sale and you’re just scan scan scan, this is a great option to have but, let me do a different book here. I’m going to change it back to live mode. Let put this other book down. Here is live mode, it again uses my Wi-Fi data connection. So not terrible, it was pretty quick, I mean I guess I have an unfair advantage my Wi-Fi is pretty quick, AT&T fiber. We got 960 Megs down, so I’m pretty quick there, so not a good test to do on a data signal. I could shut off my Wi-Fi but, you guys kind of get the idea. It will probably take maybe a second or two which isn’t terrible.

So this is what live mode shows. Live mode shows picture, shows the title, shows pretty much everything it possibly can, but I want to switch back to database mode again, really quick to show you guys something. Let me scan that original book I scanned; there you go. It came back pretty quickly, because it already remembered. When you’re in database mode and you want to check everything, so kind of refresh and show you all the pictures and everything. If you hold that on a little magnifying glass in the top right next to the text area, it’ll actually grab the data. So there you go. There’s a picture of it now, I got more information. The A in the middle, that’s Amazon’s price.

So this is not a bad book as you can see, but let me continue with the menu. I just wanted to show you a little bit more as I go down. The lock screen just locks the screen, I’m going to skip that, the buy items list I am going to skip that. If I go to settings, this is pretty cool, I mean you guys can go through these yourselves, but these are obviously… some of these are very self-explanatory so you can figure out disable sound. I think you know what that means, but one thing I did want to show you here is, we’ll get into the triggers later and you can show the item condition, you can show disabled rank color, you can change the color for different ranking and stuff like that.

One thing I want to show you here is the hidden mode feature. So if I jump back to my main screen here. Notice how I have all the information on the bottom as far as the different offers and how much they are, the different conditions, the notice in red, there’s a profit obviously, the setting I am set as under… I’m not making any money on this and I’ll explain that in a second but let me show you what I do for some of my scanners. So if I were to give this to one of my scanners, I don’t want them to see the profit. I don’t want them to see all the offers because then they’ll start asking more questions then they need to. So the great thing about this app is, especially if you’re giving it to someone else to help you scan, see that hidden mode option there in the middle. If I click on hidden mode and then jump back to the main screen, look what it did. It just cut off everything there and that’s what I want.

So what I would do, is I will go to my scanners and I always set it up myself for them, my Scouters; I would set it up for my Scouters and I would give them this and they would not see that information. So only thing they’re concerned with is the very top a buy, that’s all they need to know. And if it’s a book that isn’t a buy, it will say reject. You actually can change that as well but, I just wanted to show that quick little hidden feature option, I’ll go into that later on too.

But going down the list here enable triggers, color and these are just more cosmetic and fun things to do, but let me jump back here, account – if I clicked on that, I don’t want to because it will show you my username and password so that’s where you go and enter your username and password, because in order to kind of use the live scans and the database mode, you have to sign up some sort of account with ASellerTool.com. So I think it’s almost ten dollars a month for the lite version which means unlimited live scans, which is kind of probably where you want to start off at first, and then when you kind of get more comfortable or maybe you find yourself in places where there isn’t internet connection or that great internet connection, you can jump into database mode and I think the plan that I use is forty dollars a month and that gives your database mode, plus unlimited live, so you get both. Now there is one in the middle of that, I think it’s like 20-30 bucks, I have to look at it again. I think that’s database mode plus partial live updates, you’ll get unlimited scans. So there’s a bit of a difference there.

And the rest of the stuff I’m not going to go through too much is pretty self-explanatory here, but I will jump into the triggers soon. So let me go back here, let me kind of give you a general run-through as far as what these options are in this app.

So the top left we know, how to get to the menu, DB means I’m in database mode still, in the text area… one thing I do like about this app and you guys might find it very helpful too, it’s a silly little benefit but I think it really helps when I need to type in numbers and type in books’ ISBN numbers. I’m going to click on the text box up top. Look how big that keypad is, that is awesome like other apps just show you the general… this one here or this one here. Now how I got there, I’ll show you in a second.

Let me do this, so I clicked on the ABC on the left there and that brought me to like the normal keyboard, but I just love this because it’s so big. The keyboards are so big and the keys are so big and it’s just easier to type. So that was a one huge plus that I liked about it; I don’t find myself typing in to many ISBNs, but when I do, I don’t have to suffer through it and have to deal with a little tiny numbers. You obviously can enter in the numbers, the ISBN you know 978 and that whole deal. If you need to type in an actual book, you can just switch there, you know the book itself, you can kind of get… type it out there.

So you got a full keyboard up there if you want to search. Now that’s if your scanner isn’t working or your scanner… you don’t have a bar code to scan for example. So let me jump back to take this out, alright some back here. So cross the top, you know what mode you’re in, you got the text box, the little magnifying glass just helps you kind of give a little kick to search for you. The button on the top right is the bar code scanner, you see on the bottom right here you got a light, you can also use if you need it. I’m going to go ahead and cancel that. You have a little banner across the top that says buy. So I have trigger setup and what a trigger basically is, there’s triggers within this app that you can set up, almost like rules or conditions saying if something meets this or meet this these rules then do something with it, or do something like take an action; for example buy. So if I scan this book, which I did it, it’s telling me to buy.

Now you might notice, well why is it a buy and I’m not making any money, because you could see the profit is a negative two dollars. Well the reason for that is two reasons: one, there is a way to set how much I paid for the book and two you’ll notice how the four dollars and sixty-six cents is highlighted, that’s kind of what that profit box is looking at as well. So I can tap anywhere on here. So if I tap on the bottom right here to 73.01, look at my profit jump. Now I’m not going to sell this book for 73 dollar and a cent. Now I’m just kind of showing you what the behavior is for this app. So I can start poking around here and you’ll see the profit jumps, so that was one reason why it’s there. So if I click on the Profit button, the red box profit this gives you a nice little breakdown FBA kind of fees and stuff like that. So if I were to list this item at four dollars and sixty-six cents, I wouldn’t make any money based on the cost of purchase below and the cost per pound for shipping to amazon. So I put 65 cents that’s not my real value, it’s probably like 35 cents but I usually put 65 just to kind of a buffer.

The cost of book, let’s say it was two dollars and fifty cent which may seem kind of high but hey that’s how much it say I bought the book for. So then I am negative two dollars but let’s say I wanted to list a book on amazon for $19 and then my profit goes up to 11 and now that would be it. So that that’s kind of why it shows it red because there’s two things going on, one is that how much you put for how much the cost… you paid for the book and also, you know what setting or what offer you’re actually on. So just keep that in mind because it’s a little confusing at first, you know like why it is saying buy and whatever, so that’s that.

On the very top you have the obviously the book, the book image which is important to make sure it matches up. You have the title, you have the category which is book and then you have 116 dollars, that’s the list price the retail price of the book. Then you have the A, that’s the amazon price. So Amazon themselves are selling this book brand-new for 116 dollars, then you have the weight which is a 0.85 pounds; so not bad. Sales rank – obviously, sales rank is important that box isn’t clickable but you don’t need to because it’s the sales rank it’s fine. There is an option to add another feature to this to say sales rank and average sales rank, which is kind of nice to have. I just have mine on sales rank for now, then you have these three columns. So these three columns are very important and this is kind of where you guys need to listen up more especially if you’re an FBA seller vs merchant fulfillment seller. If you’re FBA if you’re selling FBA, you really don’t need to concentrate a whole lot on the right two columns, because those right two columns are, you know what they are? Those are merchant columns. So if you’re selling via merchant or merchant fulfilment that’s kind of what you want to focus on. So since I’m selling FBA or if you’re selling FBA when you look at apps like this, you really don’t have to concentrate too much on there; but it does give you a general idea on kind of where things are on the other side of the fence.

So I can’t say ignore them a hundred percent but maybe consider them maybe ten percent of the time, just kind of see where those things are. So when I come here, I don’t really focus too much on that. I really look at the FBA side which is the left column. Now depending on what app you are using, maybe you’re using Profit Bandit or Scoutify, the columns may be in different orders. So FBA maybe on the right for example and the merchants stuff will be on the left so… but this app in particular, everything the FBA is on the left. So what else can you do here, so the column name itself says 6 FBA, 35 Used, 27 New, 6 FBA means there are six other offers for FBA; new, used, both, combined and collectibles.

The cool thing about this app, obviously you can see the different offers, there is a buy box for $4.66 then $4.98 good, 9 dollars good, $24.98 very good and then a $116 brand-new. If I clicked on the 6 FBA column as you notice there aren’t 6 listed there, there is only five, but if I click on the 6 FBA column, it brings up like an Amazon type of page to show you all the listings, So there should be about six here, yeah there’s six here. So there’s a good, there’s two very good and there’s a new. And if you click on any one of those, it’ll give you a little bit of a description. So there’s the actual listing on Amazon, you know used condition book may have signs of cover… blah blah. So I am going to close that but you kind of get the idea; to click on the column, you get most of the listings there that you can help make a decision.

Now the one little thing that I do, just kind of a little tip that I guess I can give you guys, when I’m scanning through there, even if they’re 6 or 60 listings here, as I scroll down this first page because if there’s more than like 15, it’ll give me like another page; the next page, next page type option. If I scroll down to the first page of this listening here or this kind of like menu, and I’m not at or above ten dollars or so for the listing price or the offers, then I may or may not buy the book because that kind of gives me an idea on the different ranges these are starting at.

So for example, if I am on this first page and I’m just seeing 4 dollars, 4 dollars, 4 dollars, 5 dollars, 6 dollars and it stops around six dollars. I may or may not consider the book but obviously the third one down I am almost at 10, I made nine dollars already so that’s kind of cool.

One other thing to notice here is, the next column is 35 used. I can do the same thing if I was a merchant. I can click on 35 used, you can see you can go down there is a next button there, you can go next and kind of keep going. There is 27 new for merchant, these are pretty new as well and you know there’s a bunch of them too.

So that kind of gives you… that’s pretty much it for the some of the main features of this app. It kind of gives you a breakdown of the different merchant fulfillment’s or the different fulfillment methods you’re doing. You can adjust the profit, you can adjust the cost that cost you for the book, but towards the bottom here, you’ll notice there’s a little camel, there is a little number of books on the shelf looks like and a bunch of other things. These are other extra tools and this is one thing that makes these third-party apps much better than the Amazon seller app is not only the way it kind of shows the information, kind of all on one page, but it has these extra tools you can kind of pivot off of or pivot to, to kind of give you more of an idea.

So for example, little camel on there on the left, I’ll do a video on this later, but this is for the site called camelcamelcamel. You click on it, so I just did it opens up the camelcamelcamel site as you can see and it kind of shows you a breakdown of not only the price history, you’ll see on the middle there, there is price history tab and then the sales rank tab. Now yes up top, it has the book there, it’s says it’s sold a hundred sixteen dollars which is great or it’s selling for hundred sixteen dollars, but the sales rank tab that I’m on is probably the bread and butter of camelcamelcamel, because this shows you the history of how often it’s sold which is awesome, based on the sales rank.

So you’ll notice on the top… on the very far-right, see if I can zoom in there; on the right there you see my date ranges all, what I do is, I go ahead and choose one month; let me back up a little bit, so here, how do you read this graph. Well the graph is interesting so most of us that are obviously, have been in school and use the math is the 0 starts at the bottom and it climbs up the farther up you go. On this graph, it’s the opposite, the zero is at the top and the further down you go, the higher the number is. So that’s the first thing that confuses people is how do you read these camelcamelcamel graphs.

To make it a little easier, let me jump to the three-month graph. And then maybe the six-month. Okay that’s a little better. Look on the left column there, the left side. See at the very top it’s zero and then as it go down it gets higher; that’s the sales rank. So obviously the lower the sales rank, the better and you’ll notice here, these little spikes and these little curves and the steps mean so, the general way to read the sales rank graphs is the closer it is to the top, the better as far as a little plateaus it has. A little… I guess you can call them spikes.

So in August 12 there is a little spike there, little plateau and then it dropped, and then it went over to the right. So basically anytime you see it go up, that is a sale. So look on October 7th. It went up there and then it went up again and then it went down and then around October 26 or so, it went up and then went down twice.

So as you can see every time it goes up that is a sale. So what does this mean how do you read this? So this tells me within six months there are, I am counting basically the spikes here 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10, so maybe 9 maybe 8 to 10 sales in the last six months, which isn’t terrible based on my business model.

So if I jump to 1 year, you’ll see the graph changes a little bit. This may be a little bit easier to read, so let’s say 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15 16, so maybe 14 to 16 or so a year. So when you come to graphs like this, you want to ask yourself, how many times has this book sold in the last one month or three months or six months, and that kind of gives you an idea of how soon it would sell.

So keep that in mind, I’ll jump back to the FBAScan app, so this has a sales rank of 1.5 million. So what do we say in six months it sells 8-10? So maybe it sells once or twice a month, which isn’t terrible and there’s only six other FBA offers so I’m only competing with six other FBA people so that’s not bad at all. So this book might sell in a month or two or three or whatever depending on how I price it. And you may ask me hey Lenny how, what would you price at? Well the book itself is probably in a very new condition, you can’t see that right here but I have it next to me. I’d probably hover around, if I wanted a quick sale probably around the same price is that $24.98 offer that’s there for FBA. So I think we have a $24.90, we have two $24.98s. So I may kind of compete or kind of stick around these 24.98s and may do it for $21.99 or $29.99; it really depends on how fast I want to sell it.

If I did it for $29.99 these will probably sell quicker, which is okay because I guess it depends on your business model too. Remember in my other video I said the lower you sell it for as far as price wise and if you’re the lower seller you may wind up selling it pretty quickly. If you match them, you may kind of be like a tie around when they sell it or if you kind of price over them, you may not get the sale right away but you’ll probably make more money, more profit because you’re selling it for a little bit more money than them but it may take some time. So that’s a quick little tip there.

The other apps you have on the bottom here the next one over from camel, camel, camel is bookScouter.com. This is a great app because… it’s also a website but if you guys ever have a book that you want to sell like very quickly, you just type in the ISBN and it gives you, it pulls all these other books buyers, like legitimate buyers, like textbook.com, amazon on here, these are people that may buy the book right now. You don’t have to wait, if you have a book and you want to see how much they’ll pay you for, just jump on this site. I’ve done business with blue rocket books, textbook recycling; there were a couple books that I was able to get some good money with and they usually pay you via PayPal or check. I’ve set many many books on these places earlier on, I don’t do it too much because the books I’m getting now aren’t as good as far as these guys would want them, but when I was first starting out I was buying books on eBay in auction and selling them on these guys aside, so that’s pretty cool.

The next one over is Keepa. Keepa is more like a price trending tool similar to a camelcamelcamel but it mainly deals with pricing. As you can see it breaks it down to Amazon, new and used pricing, you can click on the statistics button on the bottom here, it gives you more of an idea breakdown of how much is this book sold for and when. So some good stuff to keep in mind as far as research goes, and the other buttons here which I am not going to go into, there’s an amazon button, it brings you right to the Amazon listing, there’s eBay button; so stuff like that. I don’t personally really use those. What I use it for mainly is to see what the competition is, the only other offers there are and kind of make a general idea or general decision on if I’m going to buy the book or not. So that’s a general over review of FBAScan.

Let me jump into a little bonus that I was going to show you my triggers. So the triggers I have here, I clicked on the little menu button on the top left. If I go to basic trigger, it gives you a breakdown what category you’ll be doing this on. So I’m going to go to book, now there’s two different types of triggers, it’s basic triggers, an advanced triggers. The basic of triggers are kind of ready to go out of the box if you want to add them in there, I think they’re even on. You’ll notice there’s a bunch of different triggers when you first start off. You can turn them off if you want, the triggers are just going to trigger the little banner on top, so it shows buy or reject. Basic triggers are good, it kind of gives you an idea like if the book price is dollars and sales rank is whatever, it will tell you if it’s something you should buy or not or consider maybe, as you can see, and they go under use. There’s different types of options as far as what type of book it is or what type of sell it is, second used price, third use price that’s the order within the listings that when you scan the book , you notice on the FBA column for example, or the merchant column; there’s different prices listed. So all this means, you know, I’ll show you, all this means is you know this is the second use, this is the third use, this is the second new, this is the third New and so on and so forth. So you have the ability to pull out information based on the results.

So that’s all that means, you know there’s different ones, there’s a bunch for merchant, a bunch for FBA. So you can play with those.

So I was playing with one, my minimum price was 2 dollars and my max rank was two million. So this is a basic trigger. When you guys first get the app, you’re not going to get the triggers to look just like this at all, you’re going to get ones that have, probably have got 8 listed there which come by default, and when you guys first start with this app, you start scanning, when you see the buy or reject on top that’s kind of what is basing off; it’s basing off this basic trigger that is by default is ok, there’s nothing wrong with this trigger, but it all depends on your business model, it all depends on what kind of books you’re looking for; you know, maybe it’s saying to buy a book, you don’t really want to or vice versa. So what I’ve done is I went to the advanced triggers and into books and this is what my advanced triggers look like and you guys can just take a screenshot of this if you want.

What this means is if the price… let me jump into the first one, it will be easier to show you. So the minimum offered price is $12.24, max rank is 2 million and the offer to use the second FBA offer. So what this means is, if I jump back to my main page here, if my second FBA offer is $12 or 24 cents more than, go ahead and mark it as a buy and if the sales rank is under 2 million. So as you can see in my FBA column it’s not $12.24 cents or over on the second item.

So just to give an idea how that works is the trigger is going to ignore that first one. So what this is doing, it’s hitting kind of three rules. If anyone of these rules is matched, it will say buy, if none of them are matched it will be reject. So the first one I explained to you, it’s not going to match it because the second FBA price is not $12.24 or higher it’s four dollars and something cents, so that one going to ignored. The second one is minimum offer price two dollars, max rank 2 million second used. So let’s see what this the minimum is there, so if I jump here… second use, so that’s here, and that’s not a match because that’s a penny book basically.

So let me jump back, so that wasn’t it. Advanced triggers, let’s go to the third one; minimum offered price is $5.99, max is to 2 million rank and the second new, so $5.99 is the minimum offer. Now you probably already know what the answer is so that’s my second new, that is definitely above $5.99. Now you may ask why I did I do this? What did I make it this way?

So a couple things to note about these triggers, whether they’re basic or advanced; and most of these apps are like this not just FBAScan, ProfitBandit does it the same way, How it’s pulling this information into the app from amazon is through an API and these third-party tools aren’t able to pull everything, all the information possible. So that’s why, if you jump on amazon.com you may see more than six listings listed here for this… for FBA for this particular book.

Because these apps are only able to pull about the first 20 items or the first 20 offers from a given listing at certain times. So you’re not going to find, it’s a hundred percent, that’s what I was telling you guys before but, this is fairly accurate the way I did this because what it does, it kind of works down the line. It starts with the FBA which is what I’m focusing on, and if there’s no FBA match, it’s looks at the used, merchant match, there’s no merchant match, it looks at the new merchant match and there is a merchant match then it triggers a buy, so I have these triggers set up for my Scouters and not only do I have it setup this way, I have it to hide all this information like I showed you guys before. So all they need to do when they go out to look at books is they scan and they look for that buy or reject on top and once they do that, if it’s a buy they’ll pull the book out and they’ll visually inspect it more to see if it’s something they want to buy.

So that’s how my triggers work, I’ll jump back there and just explain it one more time for you. Now again this may work for some of you, it may not work for most of you but this is kind of how I’ve done it, it’s worked out pretty well for me. So again the first one is second FBA, it looks for any FBA books any offers that are over $12.24 under 2 million, if it doesn’t match that, it looks at the second used merchant listing, if there’s any over two dollars, under 2 million, it matches that, if not it goes to the second new merchant; if there’s any over $5.99 under 2 million it will match it or not, and if nothing matches, it goes to reject and they move on. That’s my little bonus I want to show you guys, I hope that kind of helps explain things, it is a little confusing at first and I do apologize about that but it just take time. The one thing I got to say with these apps is, just go out and start scanning; that’s the best thing ti really do in my opinion.

Let me scan some more books. Let me scan another book here. Let me put this one down. I am in database mode. So let’s see how quickly it gets this, scanned it done. So it says this is a reject which is interesting, let’s do one thing here; now there might be a problem with this, what’s the problem? Well, I’m using database mode. My database hasn’t been updated since before the new year like December 31st and it’s saying it’s a 3.3 million rank and stuff like that, so what happens if I do this, so if you guys remember what do you do to find like the newest latest version, if you’re in database mode? You click on the little magnifying glass on the top. So let me click on that and see if that changes anything. Ah look at that, that thing changed dramatically, sales rank is below, that 3.3 million; probably because it sold since then may be a couple times. Profit is up pretty high, let’s take a look at the profit; $45.24, let me just go to Amazon there you go, there’s amazon fulfilled. So that’s not too bad but look where my I guess I you call it the selected listing, I guess you can call it. Its $45.24, that’s not where I want to be, I’m going to click on the FBA just for fun. So the buy box is 13 dollars and 25 cents. Let me go to the 4 FBA offers to see what other offers are there, so we have four different sellers selling it for this similar price between 13.25 and 13.95. So if I was them I would probably do it right around them, I’m not going to be one of those guys that tries to sell it for nineteen dollars or tries to sell it for $9.99; I’ll play the game with them. I’ll probably do it for like 13.30 or 13.29, whatever it may be. So that’s pretty cool there.

And do you know what triggered it triggered at? You don’t really know unless you know what the triggers are, so it looks like it triggered on the FBA because the second FBA was set for $12.24 and the second FBA here is around $13.25. So one thing to notice here, don’t get too confused about it; it’s just part of the app, how the API is used.

You see it says 4 FBA, you only see three listings; don’t worry about that, just click on the 4 FBA and you’ll see your four FBA here. That’s just the limitation of the FBA and the apps that are used, so that was that book that was pretty cool.

Let me show you what it looks like… let me switch to live mode.

So settings > operating mode > live mode, so now I’m in live mode. Let me do this, let me show you what it looks like in the hidden mode for those that want to give this to other people to do.

So that’s live mode, oh sorry that’s the hidden mode. Let me put this book down. I got one more, maybe two more books to show you guys; so here’s another book. Doing live mode, boom I got it. Takes a second and there you go. So you might say, where is all the information? Well remember we’re in hidden mode. This is what I usually give to my Scouters so they don’t see everything and start asking questions. So pretty lower rank in this book, but that’s all information I have so, since you guys know what I’m doing, let’s uncheck that setting – the hiding, let’s not hide it and there you go. So see there’s 5 FBAs, there is only one offer they are listed; so let’s click on the 5 FBA. The lowest FBA is $19.96 and it goes up and then there’s $20.50. So these guys are playing ball to each other you know between $19 and 20 dollars or so, let’s say I paid $2.50 for this book shipping costs 65 cents which I know is a little more than it usually is, so if I sold this book for $19.96 I’d wind up making $11, not too bad for a book, when I bought it for two dollars and fifty cents.

Yeah, that’s another book to show you guys, pretty cool stuff. Let’s look at camelcamelcamel; see how that looks. Here we go, let me jump into one month. So one month, remember that the spikes are pretty much a sale so there’s 1 2 3 4 5 so 5 in 1 month that’s good. Let’s do three months let’s see 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 so maybe nine or ten in three months. So that’s kind of how I determine, you know I can kind of set my price and kind of get an idea and how… and all you’re doing here is you’re assuming, when this will sell. You have no idea when it’s going to sell and again the sales rank is a whole another tricky topic to get into, my business model mainly deals with under two million just because I find more success that way.

It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t pick up a 5-million rank book, I would if the profit is good. So there’s a 5-million rank book and the profit when it does eventually sell is thirty dollars or more, I’d probably buy it and put it on amazon and just kind of wait, so that’s that.

And here’s another book, I used this book in another video, I just had it here. Here we go live mode kicking in, ooh a lot of red here; so what this means here, let me jump into here. So what this means here is, it’s a reject because the second FBA is under $12.24, the second used is under two dollars and the second new is under $5.99; so a reject across-the-board here. Now, some people might look at this and say okay it’s reject let’s move on but some people might even say it’s a reject I’ll buy it anyway because there may be some room for it.

Let’s look at the camelcamelcamel; camelcamelcamel is a great way to kind of get an idea like I said before on how often this thing sells. So let’s change it to one month, see maybe it has 1 2 maybe two sales and here you’ve got all those steps going down that’s not good, you want steps going up basically.

I see maybe 1 2 3, you can see there’s a couple here, these are little tiny movements not too much but not a really exciting book as you can see. So I guess that’s one reason why it went to reject. Now, again, I’m going to stress this for you guys is this app, these triggers are not perfect. The apps themselves are not perfect. The best way to really get an idea of what’s going on is from experience to play around the app yourself, you can adjust these triggers any way you want. These are just the triggers that I used to help me kind of determine and get an idea of where I want to go, some of the bigger sellers don’t use triggers at all. They use this app but don’t use triggers at all which is fine and I use these triggers mainly to kind of quickly make a decision, but I don’t use these to hundred percent, I don’t sit here and look for the greens and the Reds and make a decision.

Even if I see a buy or reject when I’m scanning, I’ll still look because I know what I’m reading. I know from experience kind of what to look for, because again sometimes it’s not perfect but if you have like a college student or a single parent that you can hire doing this you know maybe give them two dollars and fifty cents a book depending on how much they’re paying for the book, given the app, set it up, sign up for them and go ahead and set them up with it and you’ll pay them two dollars and fifty cents a book, once they get it, and they’ll make some sort of money.

So for example, the reason why I’m giving people 2.50 is most of them go to goodwill or I tell them to go to Goodwill’s and the paperbacks are a dollar so they’ll wind up making a dollar fifty per book, hardcovers are two dollars so they’ll wind up making fifty cents a book. So if I said two dollars a book they wouldn’t make any money off hardcovers. So I kind of give you know the 2.50, just so they have a little bit of room to make some money. So there’s some sort of motivation; but depending on where you live, you may in a place where there’s similar places like Goodwill’s, there may be all books are a dollar.

You can probably say I’ll give you two dollars for a book, so it really depends on where you are. I really hope this helps, definitely check out ASellerTool.com. I’m not affiliated with them at all, I just use there app as a customer, but you need to check out their subscription plans to kind of find the best one that suits you. Again the lite version is what I have my sellers use and what I would recommend you guys using when you first start off, unless you’re noticing yourself and your seller is kind of getting stuck because of the data connection, the signal is very poor. You then can upgrade to the other versions which allow you to download the database, which I showed you guys at the beginning of the movie or the video, that’s pretty much it. I mean there may be a few little things here in the settings but a lot of it is self-explanatory. I really hope you guys enjoyed the video and I’ll talk to you later bye.

So there you go not too bad right. So there’s the app for you I hope that really help and clear things up for you. If you have any questions or comments about what I said about the app maybe I missed something, go and add it in the comments below and I’ll be more happy to answer them for you but that’s the kind of app, you know again there are some bells and whistles, there are some general features that app and other apps have, but there are some other features that this app has that others don’t specifically the database mode. That’s a huge plus especially for people going into areas like book sales and libraries where the signal for your phone isn’t great, so every time you scan a book it takes forever to actually get the information you need. So that database mode is perfect.

The hidden feature mode is really cool so you can give this app to your other people that are helping your scout for books and you may or may not want them to see how much money or profit the book can get or book can have, so you can hide that feature from them so they don’t see that, which is great, but I’ll go into that topic later on another video like the steps that I used to hire people, what I tell them, what I don’t tell them; things like that.

But I really hope you enjoy the video. Please don’t forget to subscribe to the channel if you enjoy this, you want to learn more and again I’ll be putting out videos every now and then about different features, different tools you know different processes that I use.